Okay never watched any of your content before this and honestly seeing the title it felt like it was a massive undertaking that was overselling the coverage. And here I am an hour in and have to stop and comment that this is a damn fine video and definitely going to have to me checking out the rest of the channel. Yeah you very much can't go over every single title in existence but have some excellent highlights and, more importantly, context of how the gaming landscape and genre were changing.
Lol, LITERALLY watched your history of RPGs the other day and you mentioned JRPGs and that you would have to do a separate video on it and probably won't. I was pretty upset hearing that. Happy to see this. I'll give it a watch later.
@@EasyGreekVideos So, just to clarify, what's the difference in meaning between "watched your history of RPGs the other day and "LITERALLY watched your history of RPGs the other day?"
The intro section that attempts a definition, only to stumble closer and closer to the realization that each and all definitions either include things one does not want to include, or exclude others that surely cannot be excluded, is slowly becoming my favorite part of NeverKnowsBest videos.
Yeah lol, for RPGs you can pick three games everyone agrees is an RPG and make EVERY definition fail: Mass Effect 2 has no stat based gameplay. At all, it plays like a shooter. Early Gold Box dungeon crawlers have basically no story or choices. Or quests. Final Fantasy 4 has zero customization outside of gear upgrades. Every single definition fails because it either can't include Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, or Dungeon Hack. I think an RPG is what FEELS like an RPG. It's literally just vibes.
It's really difficult to overstate how pivotal and important 2017 was as a renaissance for JRPGs. Dragon Quest and Persona proved that there was still demand for turn based games, while Ys, Xenoblade and Nier proved that experimenting with action and realtime could yield success. We ate so much shit in the jump to HD but now that studios had stabilised, JRPGs really came back swinging hard. I think in recent years, 2024 is the only one to come close to 2017 for JRPGs. Possibly 2022 as well cuz of XC3 and Star Ocean 6. New Star Ocean and new Seiken Densetsu (and the general quality of both) really indicates the amazing health of our genre.
@@kirbeeezoh we're mentioning indies now huh?OK. How about Chained Echoes, Crosscode, 8-Bit Adventures 2, Beloved Rapture, Cosmic Star Heroine, This way madness lies, and yeah sea of stars
@JohnSyzlack Seriously, I thought he was a moderate before he dropped the Sweet Baby, Inc video. Probably should have just stuck to the retrospectives.
@@JakeTappersFriendwhat was extreme about it? I can't remember it that well, but it didn't seem like it was exactly pro any position, just anti one particularly extreme position.
Much like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, these two are my favorite to fall asleep to, and I mean that without offense! Truly quite the calming cadence, which is very much appreciated.
@@Outplayedqt I love Noah too, though both unique, there is a calmness to their narration. I love Noah's handmade intro's, I found him with his Homeworld video and have been a fan ever since.
Should also mention that I did in fact watch the video nearly to completion and aside from the previous comment, the video itself is well put together and educational. There is a bit of having to know your own video game history to appreciate so the of subtle remarks you make about certain games, which is also quite fun. Great work.
Really great point you make about RPG’s and anime. Here in England there was 0 anime in the mainstream during the late 90’s 🤷♂️ when people ask what was the first anime you ever saw I have to say FFVII. It was the first piece of Japanese media most people I knew ever saw full stop. All the story elements in it that I now recognise of tropes of the genre seemed amazingly new and exciting at the time. There really was nothing else like it. The idea of a video game that took 60+ hrs to finish would have been completely unimaginable here just the year before, as console kids we just didn’t see video games capable of telling stories like that.
@@KasumiRINAit depends if you include stuff like Pokemon, digimon and yu gi oh as anime then sure there was some in the mainstream and even back into the 80s you had some anime in the UK but it wasn’t its own thing it was just cartoons even dragonball wasn’t considered anything separate from all the other cartoons. Anime movies like Akira were also shown on tv in the late 80/ early 90s but they were shown as world cinema not as anime in particular. Anime fandom as it is now is relatively new and its thanks to the internet and streaming before then you had to hope a localization happened and you either caught the show/movie on tv or you got lucky and were able to buy it as a tape which could be rare since some of the shows got very limited releases. Technically both you and op are correct since those shows you listed were relatively mainstream but since anime as used today didn’t exist they were just considered afterschool/ Saturday morning cartoons and the movies like akira and ninja scroll or vampire hunter d were world cinema curiosities and they had vastly different audiences. Jrpgs and anime basically have a similar story, single properties like final fantasy or dragonball had fans but until the late 90s early 2000s because until the ps1 since jrpg games as a genre in the UK/Europe didn’t exist apart from the odd release and as for anime the genre it just didn’t exist you could find dragonball in the kids section of a video rental shop/ high street store and vampire hunter d in the horror section.
while i can't support this channel on patreon, i again want to appreciate what you've done with this channel ever since the gothic video. I love the direction you've taken this in as every video of yours has been incredibly fascinating
Um, IDK when this became a feature but the description now has a "People mentioned" section when you click show more and one person there stands out from the rest LOL.
So, minor correction: the Lunar series was not actually made by Game Arts, but only published by them (in Japan). Studio Alex was the name of the Lunar developers, and they were yet another team who made their exodus from Nihon Falcom in the late 80s. Disagreements about the publishing of the Lunar series resulted in Studio Alex attempting to sue Game Arts, but they would ultimately lose the case which led to them going bankrupt. At that point, Game Arts picked up the Lunar IP and made the catastrophic Lunar Dragon Song, and the series was put to rest after that (aside from ports and remakes).
Yoichi Miyaji has top billing on both Lunar and first two Grandia games, and credits for Silver Star Story list this: People credited on this game were also credited on: Grandia, a group of 22 people Lunar: Silver Star Story - Complete, a group of 20 people Lunar: Eternal Blue, a group of 19 people Yumimi Mix, a group of 19 people Grandia II, a group of 16 people That's a significant overlap between Game Arts teams and first Lunar developers.
Thanks for this superb video, and especially for naming your sources, H101, and that Bitmap book (A guide to japanese role playing games) is also a gem
JRPGs in general have some of the best music. The Trails series is still my personal favorite soundtrack ever, which the series as a whole being so hard to rate higher then the other.
I've enjoyed your videos from fairly early into the channel, but this era of 'history of broad topic' is, in my opinion, your golden age (just uhhh... hopefully it lasts longer than the jrpg one). I also wanted to say I appriciated the shoutouts to the references you gave at the end, they look like super interesting reads and I'll for sure be checking them out.
I remember when you said you wouldn't do this, and I'm really glad you changed your mind. It's easy to forget what Persona 5 meant for the genre, so many years removed from it and so many spinoffs and gacha collabs down the timeline that a lot of us are jaded about it, it was a truly historical moment in gaming. The end of the modern era chapter, listing down the sheer number of not just releases but GOOD releases brought a single tear to my eye. What a tale you've woven.
And its global release was the same year as BotW, Nier, Hollow Knight, Dragon Quest 11, RE7, Mario Odyssey, & Xenoblade 2. A year of genre defining games I don't think we've seen since.
I'm guessing you're too young to remember, but they did the exact same thing with Persona 4. Everyone loved it, then they released a bunch of spinoffs and half-hearted collabs and it made everyone sick of it. That's just the Atlus way, sadly. Persona 4 was more popular than 3, so they milked to to death, then Persona 5 was more popular than 4, so they ALSO milked it to death. The games themselves are good, it's just all the bloat around it (and certain parts of the fandom) that are obnoxious.
What a fantastic video. As someone who never watches long videos, I couldn’t put this one down. This was one of the best researched and best produced videos I’ve had the pleasure of watching on gaming history. It even motivated me to take copious notes on my phone while watching! Thank you for making and sharing this. It’s brought me a lot of joy :)
Loving this video so far and how in-depth it is. Also, thank you for remembering the Rayearth Saturn RPG! I know it’s a tie-in game for a series from another medium and a hard sell, but that game holds a special place in my heart.
Always a pleasure to see you upload. Was hoping for mention of magna carta 1 or 2. But cant complain with just the shear amount of work that has gotten into this video. Thank you
This was an amazing video, and I can't give you enough praise for how well put together everything was. Honestly, I started watching, and before I knew it, my entire afternoon just disappeared. Thank you for the history lesson.
I grew up playing video games, but i wasn't exposed to any of the JRPG's on any of the systems on the NES, SNES, and genesis due to various factors, so i came i started a bit late. My first JRPG was FFVIII, and have since been a huge of fan of JRPGs. I've gone back and forth over the years, catching up on classic titles in some series, and i can say that JRPG's are typically one of the few genres that i can say that are my "comfort" genres to play, for various reasons. The rich History of JRPG's, along with one of the highlights of the genre, the music, makes it that more endearing and feeds into nostalgia for a lot of people. I'm glad that there is a resurgence right now for remasters and rereleases for certain JRPG's to get their due dilgence in the west (like dragon quest III remaster, and Live a Live), and i'll be there to support the devs who try.
What a masterful video. I just finished the whole thing, and I loved how this video truly maps out the history of JRPGs and the breadth of what the genre was and became. Thank you for making such an amazing video. It maps out so much of my childhood and also many games I need to play and some I have never even heard of. Thank you so much NeverKnowsBest.
Reading these comments, it sounds like a lot of you have never watched a video of someone talking about jrpg’s. It’s a fine video, but it’s exactly like several other ones that I’ve seen. I wouldn’t say it stands out from the others, if anything it falls a little short to them. But it’s good that you’re appreciative
35:28 Fun fact, Phantasy Star was one of the first games to ever be translated to portuguese in Brazil, and because of that it got to create a nice enough fanbase around here, where many who grew up with the master system (which was on the market for basically decades here) remember it very fondly nowadays.
Quick question, are jrpgs popular in your country? I go on Reddit and see a lot of your people saying nobody knows about said jrpgs or that it’s almost “non existent” but I just don’t get it when you guys are pretty much a PlayStation country(I also heard famicom were popular there,maybe not as much as Sega but you guys had a lot of clones).
Genuinely one of the best gaming related videos I’ve watched on TH-cam. Deeply engaging, informative and entertaining. Loved the vid, definitely subscribed!
These videos are like one of the many memorable JRPGs mentioned, you reach to the end and wish you could erase your memory so you can re-live it again. Amazing work, cheers!
A year ago: The Entire History of Video Games Half a year ago: The Entire History of RPGs Now: The Entire History of Japanese RPGs Half a year from now: ??? Taking bets on what subcategory of Japanese Role-Playing Games NeverKnowsBest is gonna tackle next!
This guy deserves more subscribers with the amount of quality he has with his videos, loved this video and legit did not see myself sitting down to watch it for 2 hours lol yet I did
A correction at 1:26:19 - yes, there were television commercials for JRPGs before FFVII in the US. Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior), Final Fantasy IV (II) and VI (III) definitely had them and I believe Chrono Trigger had one too. You can find them on TH-cam even! But I don’t believe any of them ran in primetime - I remember seeing them after school and on Saturday mornings. When FFVII did get that primetime advertising campaign though, those commercials blew my mind as a kid (along with the fact that we somehow jumped ahead four Final Fantasies! 😂)
I just discovered your channel the other day and I've already watched about 20 hours of your content. You're already up there with my other favorites like SuperEyePatchWolf etc. Fantastic videos man!
Incredible video. Very in-depth and informative without getting too lost from the main line of the video. I’ll watch this for many years to come. Thank you!
A lot of JRPGs were missed on the Saturn and Dreamcast. A few of them being brawlers ported from the arcade. Others receiving ports on later consoles. The tactical genre notably including the Sakura Taisen series that also mixed in some sort of dating sim features. There is a small section missing from arcade ports and another from indies and the Doujinshi market on PC mostly but alSo on portables like the PSP and psvita
Heck yeah a NeverKnowsBest on JRPG's, I might not have the time right now and will probably watch this in parts. Know that these videos are much appreciated and I do love them! :D
I always consider a new upload from this channel to be a treat. Your narration is always enjoyable, I like the pacing of the occasional quip to inject some personality, and you strike a good balance between depth and brevity. (Well, for those of us with the patience for a three hour retrospective timeline on video game history.) As an aside, I know you've had some issues striking out of video games, but I'll say that your videos on games I've got no reference for (like the Gothic franchise) were still great - that is to say, if you make it, I'll watch it.
Weird to claim that Final Fantasy 3 was the game that moved the series away form more drawn-out dungeons, when that game has perhaps the most drawn-out dungeons of the entire series. The final dungeon in particular has no competition in the entire series, and almost the entire genre.
The dungeons get progressively more drawn out as the game goes on but in the first half of the game the dungeons are short and quick. I mean while you're on the floating island the biggest dungeon you experience is about 5 rooms. Whereas final fantasy 2s dungeons are all super long and full of dead ends meant simply to draw out playtime and create more random encounters. Relatively speaking final fantasy 3 is a huge departure from the previous game. And even the final dungeon (assuming we call the world of darkness a separate dungeon from the crystal tower) is just linear paths with boss rooms at the end
The final dungeon is insane, but most of the rest of the dungeons in the game are pretty short compared to the previous games. Also there's more "quests" that happen outside of dungeons, like the kingdom where you crash land and end up fighting Garuda.
@@WolvesbaneNetworkfirst three Final Fantasy games are ALL huge departures from what came before and IMO FF4 dungeons are far more annoying than 1's, especially ones where you have to recast float after every floor transition and they're made like mazes you need to go up and down multiple times.
Hey NKB, I know this is off topic, but I just really wanted to thank you for all your awesome content. I discovered you fairly recently, and I now watch/listen to your videos all day long at work (I’ve watched your “entire history of gaming” video twice (😳). It makes the day fly by! Keep up the great work! 😁
I just want to appreciate how Atlus still continues to release games that adhere to their original vision, while Square seems ashamed of their turn-based roots and prefers to just make action games now.
I think squares vision has just shifted since then. Also they're still dropping turn based games like octopath. I think the failure of final fantasy 13 has kinda tainted final fantasy from staying turn based (even though the final fantasy 7 remakes have a mixed turn based system). And they've been making action RPGs for years, that's what secret of mana and kingdom hearts were. Atlus has just chosen to stick with turn based cuz the formula is what really set them into the main stream (most notably with persona)
@@pogethedoge Yeah, that's what I mean. But it was also the pushback from western media that mocked japanese games for being outdated and boring compared to 'more exciting' western games. The last FF game I had genuine fun with was 9 and I played every game in the series before that. Since then I always had problems with next entries and after 16 and first remake of 7 I've seen enough, not even gonna bother with the second part of the remake. They can't make a good jRPG or a good action game, FF series is dead to me, while I will play every single Persona and SMT game as long as it stays true to itself.
@@ThatDjinn I've enjoyed a lot of the modern action final fantasies, but I do feel they could be structured in a more interesting way. Remake had a lot of great ideas, especially the combat, music and graphics, but it just feels like a super formulaic action game in terms of structure. Whereas, a game like NieR automata has much more generic combat than remake, but feels completely unique despite this. I would love to see some other teams thrown into the mix, maybe even some of the guys who worked on NieR. Haven't played shin megami, but persona is pretty good. Haven't invested too much time into it though, maybe one day.
Amazing video!!! This video popped up randomly for me and I'm so glad I watched it. I'm a long-time JRPG fan and this gave a lot of interesting points about games I love. In response to your Suikoden pronunciation question, if you write it out phonetically すいこでん, it is pronounced su-i-ko-de-n, but when pronounced in spoken Japanese the gap between the u and i disappears and they blend together, giving you swee-ko-den, like in the commercial.
I never finished Lost Odyssey, but I still remember the Thousand Years of Dreams as some of the best bits of short fiction I've ever read. The cicada forest story, especially, is a deeply compelling one.
Absolutely. While I found the game's overall narrative to be rather weak and disappointing in the end (the "twist" explanation for the cast's immortality was stupid, and the main villain is SOOO lame and childishly cartoonish), the Thousand Years of Dreams segments are still to this day some of the finest writing I've seen in the genre alongside the Nier and Xeno franchises.
I love this channel. Perfect background content for when I'm doing something else, and interesting and informative about a topic I've loved since childhood when I'm paying more attention. Thank you; I need this in my life.
I wished .//hack series had at least a mention, it wasn't as successful or memorable as other franchises but the first 4 titles during the PS2 era, which were part of the same narrative, were very enjoyable and had a banger opening theme
Thank you so much, I love these videos. And thank you for the extended list of games I need to check out that I seem to have missed out on. I've played a good number of the games here, but so many more look amazing and I need to try them.
FFVS13 wasn't ever a game. Nomura pitched a game and before it was hammered down others made trailers for it. Quite literally nothing about the game was hammered out until tabata started working ~2 yrs before 15s release on what was "vs13" The game isn't a curse or felt because it literally never existed in any form. Even the basic concept of what the game was shifted a few hundred times while Nomura was busy on KH The game just shouldn't have been announced and shown off when nothing of it was actually even out of the random ideas coming into peoples heads (it was basically just tossing around concepts for the game nomura was meant to take on after his current projects were done, instead it got pushed and made into 15) At the time he was pitching it and trying to hammer it out Nomura got stuck on KH and FF7, trying to figure out a 3rd unrelated game that barely even has the names done is a near impossible task
Exactly. That game derailed Final Fantasy into the trash bin. If Squenix was smart (hint: they're not), they'll give us a proper turn-based, traditional mainline FF PLUS an action-based FF, rather than completely abandoning an entire foundation of your fanbase. You know, kinda like the ORIGINAL PLAN for FF13 trilogy was supposed to be???
And furthermore, not only is FF16 only getting out of that heap by being almost a different genre entirely, depending on how Kingdom Hearts 4 goes it could also ruin the Kingdom Hearts series considering ideas from VS XIII are being repurposed into Kingdom Hearts 3 at least.
Vagrant Story is by no means perfect and I definitely had to use a guide to figure out some of it's quirks, but god damn it's so unique and impressive and I wish we could ever get any sort of spiritual succesor to it of any kind.
I just found your channel recently and i cant stop rewatching your videos, easily the best channel ive found in a very long time! Thank you for all the effort you put into each video, i love these long form videos so much. It seems like we get a new video every few months so im hoping there will be a new one soon 😊 Thank you for all the amazing videos, youre the best!
An RPG video game is basically a table top game on your TV. Certainly as far as battle mechanics are concerned. That is, turn based. Sometimes also with movement tactics.
The main issue with the popular/MGS pronunciation of Suikoden is the emphasis on the 'ko' syllable, as if it's Suikōden. With your pronunciation, on the other hand, "sui" as "swee" is a bit off to my ears. Consecutive vowel sounds in particular in Japanese (and their vowels in general) can be pretty tricky for native Anglophones.
The jrpg definition debate always struck me as extremely obtuse. For example, Italian and Japanese food don't stop being that just by virtue of someone of a different ethnicity or nationality making it. We understand that the country labels are there to denote the origin of a style, not the person making the thing. Moreover, genre labels are only useful insofar they serve the purpose of making it easier for people to find similar things. We put fantasy novels on one shelf away from say, sci fi, for the purpose of making it easier to find particular types of novels which shares many traits with the other novels with which it is grouped. Hence, the question to ask whether it makes sense to label something a jrpg is whether or not, is only with respects to if fits in on a general venn diagram with some average of the other titles in the genre - in this case, as established in the 80s and 90s with games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. If someone came to you, hot off of completing Chrono Trigger and wanting a similar title to play next, and you wouldn't recommend Dark Souls or Dragon's Dogma, then they're not useful to classify as jrpgs. Converserly, it would make sense to recommend certain western indie callback titles that were made specifically to look, sound, play, and feel like your average 90s jrpg. This isn't brain-science, and yet it's apparently eluded a great many gamers, and still does.
It kinda is, because once you dig a bit, there is not that much difference between JRPG and western RPG. For example, most people would aknowledge Shin Megami Tensei as a JRPG. But SMT has CoC, an alignment system, an UI took straight outta Wizardry and a fuckton of things we usually associate with "western" games. Should we start considering it a CRPG instead? There simply isn't a clear line between western RPG and JRPG that doesn't require a milion of "ifs" and "buts".
@@noukan42 This reminds me that Wizardry itself remained beloved by Japanese players even as its popularity faded in its home country, to the point that the series was even taken over by Japanese devs up until recently. The Etrian Odyssey series are textbook examples of grid-based, dungeon-crawling RPGs straight out of that lineage, but because they have Anime-ish aesthetics, there's always a temptation to call them JRPGs. I suspect this "JRPG" label thing is mostly a US-centric post-00s phenomenon, when console RPGs made in the US like Fable or Elder Scrolls started to become popular, so a sharp contrast between them and their Japanese-made counterparts had to be drawn. Before that, American-made RPGs mostly inhibited the PC ecosystem, and Japanese RPGs dominated consoles. Back in the 90s we'd call Final Fantasy, Diablo, Planescape: Torment and Ultima Online all "RPGs" with added qualifiers like "online, turn-based, action or D&D-based". The closest I recall to ever using something like "JRPG" was describing Chrono Trigger to a friend as an "Anime RPG". I suspect this is still how most people define it whether they want to admit it or not: stylistically rather than mechanically.
@sodvar5047 wizardry is a perfect example of why it is problematic. The snes and ps1 ports of wizardry 1-5 have a clearly animesque artstyle. But it would be absurd to call those games JRPG.
Yeah this is so weird to me, but gamers can be a little weird about Japan so it's probably to be expected. People who play board game don't debate what is or isn't a eurogame based on who designed it, it's understood that it describes some mechanics and feel about games more than where those trends originated. I think people who like and want to defend Japan/act like they're underdogs should be proud that a whole genre is named after the country, even if some people don't like it, it still has some of the most important and recognisable games out there.
I mean those are polar opposites examples, Chrono Trigger is a traditional turn-based JRPG following the conventions of games like Dragon Quest, Ultima and Wizardry while Dark Souls is a more modern action-adventure JRPG which iterates on what games like Ocarina of Time started, if your friend wanted to watch something like Record of Lodoss you couldn't send him to watch Konosuba yes they're both fantasy anime but they're worlds apart.
Very good video. Really good. A few nitpicks: - While the inclusion of The Legend of Zelda might be debatable I would clearly define it as (actio) JRPG as games like Landstalker, Soleil, Story of Thor, the Quintet games and so on, so I don´t think it is consistent to leave it out. - The Gamecube part was a bit short and left out Fire Emblem as an example of a high production SRPG on this console generation as well as Baten Kaitos Origins or the Lost Kingdom games e.c. - One of the two best JRPGs on the seventh generation wasn´t mentioned: Nier (with Xenoblade being the other best JRPG of this generation) - I already noticed the absence of Drakengard. Other than that it is - as I said - a really good video.
thank you for making these long videos, your tone and tempo and writing are all really pleasant to listen to and easy to follow, and its honestly about damn time someone made video game history accessible! p.s. if you ever happen to do a q&a, i would LOVE to hear about your research process
your videos are so interesting theres a bunch of videos on youtube about games on the internet but your videos... looks like you know how it trully felt like back then thank you, keep em coming!!
A fantastic video not just for its historical and educational value, but also because it's such a *treasure trove* of titles to play! I am so grateful I watched this video.
Defining JRPGs as RPGs derived from, or inspired by, Japanese media is circular, because JRPGs *are* Japanese media. I think it is much more simple to say that "JRPG" is not a genre, but simply denotes RPGs that are made in Japan. This means that, yes, Dark Souls is a JRPG. Most Japanese games in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, and beyond, shared the manga aesthetic and inspiration, but no one is calling Mega-Man a "J-Platformer," or Puyo Puyo a "J-Puzzler," or Street Fighter a "J-Fighter." JRPGs have generally had some characteristics in common, but there are always exceptions. They include many sub-genres like S-RPGs, Action-RPGs, Dungeon Crawlers, etc. The only things they universally share in common are the fact that they have RPG elements and that they are Japanese-it is that simple, I think.
all genres are circular. all language is circular. also i like how your criticism is that his definition is circular and then just repeated his circular definition at the end of your post and acted like you came up with it and acted like it was at all different from his definition. jrpg as a term obviously exists because non-japanese rpg players felt the need to recognize rpgs from japan as some kinda distinct category based on where they came from. You can literally go back to the first usage of the term JRPG and see it's exactly that, right now, for yourself, just google it. Any other explanation is just agonizing to try to make non-japanese developed, jrpg inspired games fit into the category.
@Snowjob109 I think you may have misread my conclusion. His definition is that J does not mean “Japanese” but “inspired by Japanese media.” I’m saying that J simply means “Japanese,” as to exclude RPGs that are made outside of Japan. So, for example, Dark Souls is a JRPG, but Undertale is not. I also don’t think it’s a genre, RPG is the genre, the J only denotes where they came from.
The problem with this is that it makes JRPG a useless label, as it doesn't help you to determine games that are similar. If you arent using it as a genre label, then i dont see what the purpose of the term even is.
@@pokeslob You can 'think' all you want, but presenting what merely is your opinion, your take, as if they were facts set in stone does not make them so. It's generally agreed upon that JRPG refers to its style as described in this video. And you saying "No, I'M saying that it only means japanese-made, therefore I'M right!" louder and louder doesn't change that.
@@MarthSR there is no general agreement for what jrpg refers to and the video contradicts itself by excluding dark souls despite it meeting every criteria he listed. genre definitions are literally only opinion regardless, so you're not really making a point here
Okay never watched any of your content before this and honestly seeing the title it felt like it was a massive undertaking that was overselling the coverage. And here I am an hour in and have to stop and comment that this is a damn fine video and definitely going to have to me checking out the rest of the channel. Yeah you very much can't go over every single title in existence but have some excellent highlights and, more importantly, context of how the gaming landscape and genre were changing.
You're in for a treat...he has SO many great videos
Welcome to the party, pal. Even subjects which might not normally seem interesting... click play and three hours disappear.
Enjoy diving into the entire history of RPGs.
This guy makes so much good content and it's really worth checking out
Lol, LITERALLY watched your history of RPGs the other day and you mentioned JRPGs and that you would have to do a separate video on it and probably won't. I was pretty upset hearing that. Happy to see this. I'll give it a watch later.
The exact same for me, just a few days ago.
Glad you clarified you literally watched it and not just figuratively.
Same situation, I finally got around to it the day before this one came out.
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 It was literally the other day
@@EasyGreekVideos So, just to clarify, what's the difference in meaning between "watched your history of RPGs the other day and "LITERALLY watched your history of RPGs the other day?"
The intro section that attempts a definition, only to stumble closer and closer to the realization that each and all definitions either include things one does not want to include, or exclude others that surely cannot be excluded, is slowly becoming my favorite part of NeverKnowsBest videos.
Yeah lol, for RPGs you can pick three games everyone agrees is an RPG and make EVERY definition fail:
Mass Effect 2 has no stat based gameplay. At all, it plays like a shooter.
Early Gold Box dungeon crawlers have basically no story or choices. Or quests.
Final Fantasy 4 has zero customization outside of gear upgrades.
Every single definition fails because it either can't include Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, or Dungeon Hack.
I think an RPG is what FEELS like an RPG. It's literally just vibes.
@@KasumiRINAhe also quotes videogamedunkey as a legitimate authority on the subject 😂
It's really difficult to overstate how pivotal and important 2017 was as a renaissance for JRPGs. Dragon Quest and Persona proved that there was still demand for turn based games, while Ys, Xenoblade and Nier proved that experimenting with action and realtime could yield success. We ate so much shit in the jump to HD but now that studios had stabilised, JRPGs really came back swinging hard.
I think in recent years, 2024 is the only one to come close to 2017 for JRPGs. Possibly 2022 as well cuz of XC3 and Star Ocean 6. New Star Ocean and new Seiken Densetsu (and the general quality of both) really indicates the amazing health of our genre.
There's also unicorn overlord, Octopath Traveler, Bravely Default 2 and other smaller jrpg games that get bigger
@@shutup1037sea of stars as well. I very much enjoyed it
@@kirbeeezoh we're mentioning indies now huh?OK. How about Chained Echoes, Crosscode, 8-Bit Adventures 2, Beloved Rapture, Cosmic Star Heroine, This way madness lies, and yeah sea of stars
@@silkdust8069 I can consider indi rpg has j-rpg since they more often inspire by j-rpg. The amont of j-rpg we have acess to this day is amazing.
Yeah even if they arent made by japan but it does have that jrpg spirit@@kingdomhearts9714
Your content is honestly some of the best in this platform, you have no idea how much joy I got to see that you've posted! Can't wait to watch!
totally agree.
🤢
His political commentary is cringe.
@JohnSyzlack Seriously, I thought he was a moderate before he dropped the Sweet Baby, Inc video. Probably should have just stuck to the retrospectives.
@@JakeTappersFriendwhat was extreme about it? I can't remember it that well, but it didn't seem like it was exactly pro any position, just anti one particularly extreme position.
I very much appreciate the cadence in which you narrate. Very well thought out and easy to follow. Cheers!
Much like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, these two are my favorite to fall asleep to, and I mean that without offense! Truly quite the calming cadence, which is very much appreciated.
Fantastic narration.
@@Outplayedqt I love Noah too, though both unique, there is a calmness to their narration. I love Noah's handmade intro's, I found him with his Homeworld video and have been a fan ever since.
Should also mention that I did in fact watch the video nearly to completion and aside from the previous comment, the video itself is well put together and educational. There is a bit of having to know your own video game history to appreciate so the of subtle remarks you make about certain games, which is also quite fun. Great work.
@@Outplayedqt
Noah
Our Beloved
Some of the best long form content on TH-cam. Much love.
Definitely. I love long-form stuff anyway but it can only work if it's good.
Nod nod nod. Poor long form is just chores in disguise.
Really great point you make about RPG’s and anime. Here in England there was 0 anime in the mainstream during the late 90’s 🤷♂️ when people ask what was the first anime you ever saw I have to say FFVII. It was the first piece of Japanese media most people I knew ever saw full stop. All the story elements in it that I now recognise of tropes of the genre seemed amazingly new and exciting at the time. There really was nothing else like it. The idea of a video game that took 60+ hrs to finish would have been completely unimaginable here just the year before, as console kids we just didn’t see video games capable of telling stories like that.
Interesting, people in Europe grew up on Sailor Moon and Slayers, and entire USA are Dragonball nerds.
@@KasumiRINAit depends if you include stuff like Pokemon, digimon and yu gi oh as anime then sure there was some in the mainstream and even back into the 80s you had some anime in the UK but it wasn’t its own thing it was just cartoons even dragonball wasn’t considered anything separate from all the other cartoons.
Anime movies like Akira were also shown on tv in the late 80/ early 90s but they were shown as world cinema not as anime in particular. Anime fandom as it is now is relatively new and its thanks to the internet and streaming before then you had to hope a localization happened and you either caught the show/movie on tv or you got lucky and were able to buy it as a tape which could be rare since some of the shows got very limited releases.
Technically both you and op are correct since those shows you listed were relatively mainstream but since anime as used today didn’t exist they were just considered afterschool/ Saturday morning cartoons and the movies like akira and ninja scroll or vampire hunter d were world cinema curiosities and they had vastly different audiences.
Jrpgs and anime basically have a similar story, single properties like final fantasy or dragonball had fans but until the late 90s early 2000s because until the ps1 since jrpg games as a genre in the UK/Europe didn’t exist apart from the odd release and as for anime the genre it just didn’t exist you could find dragonball in the kids section of a video rental shop/ high street store and vampire hunter d in the horror section.
California is in Japan if you live in the Ace Attorney world
Japanifornia
@@ram10- Konnichiwa from Japangeles!
Eat your hamburgers, Apollo
Hawaii is mostly Japanese people. California is more Chinese. FF confirmed started in China 🇨🇳
0 California is in all of us.. and you must stamp it out.
Even though I've drifted away from the genre for years now, JRPGs will always feel like home. Thanks for the video NKB.
The entire history of Japanese RPGs? Thank you, NeverKnowsBest.
AlwaysKnowsBest 👍
while i can't support this channel on patreon, i again want to appreciate what you've done with this channel ever since the gothic video. I love the direction you've taken this in as every video of yours has been incredibly fascinating
Um, IDK when this became a feature but the description now has a "People mentioned" section when you click show more and one person there stands out from the rest LOL.
I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE DUNKY (and got flash-banged when i went to look)
Oh…
xD omg
Lol who is it because it's not showing up for me
@WolvesbaneNetwork your first guess will probably be right.
So, minor correction: the Lunar series was not actually made by Game Arts, but only published by them (in Japan). Studio Alex was the name of the Lunar developers, and they were yet another team who made their exodus from Nihon Falcom in the late 80s. Disagreements about the publishing of the Lunar series resulted in Studio Alex attempting to sue Game Arts, but they would ultimately lose the case which led to them going bankrupt. At that point, Game Arts picked up the Lunar IP and made the catastrophic Lunar Dragon Song, and the series was put to rest after that (aside from ports and remakes).
Truly there's no justice in this world...
Yoichi Miyaji has top billing on both Lunar and first two Grandia games, and credits for Silver Star Story list this:
People credited on this game were also credited on:
Grandia, a group of 22 people
Lunar: Silver Star Story - Complete, a group of 20 people
Lunar: Eternal Blue, a group of 19 people
Yumimi Mix, a group of 19 people
Grandia II, a group of 16 people
That's a significant overlap between Game Arts teams and first Lunar developers.
Genuinely get excited when I see a new video drop from you, keep up the good work.
Dude, I just really want to say I love your content immensely. Keep it up.
Another banger by the long form GOAT. Hope you are having a good weekend man!
Thanks for this superb video, and especially for naming your sources, H101, and that Bitmap book (A guide to japanese role playing games) is also a gem
That Chrono Trigger soundtrack, man… what an achievement.
Absolutely. 🫡
I wanna keep playing the game, but i cant catch that stupid fuqin rat
JRPGs in general have some of the best music. The Trails series is still my personal favorite soundtrack ever, which the series as a whole being so hard to rate higher then the other.
2:39:52 "Simple or Clean" I see what you did there. I may have missed every other easter egg in this video, but I got this one. A++
I've enjoyed your videos from fairly early into the channel, but this era of 'history of broad topic' is, in my opinion, your golden age (just uhhh... hopefully it lasts longer than the jrpg one). I also wanted to say I appriciated the shoutouts to the references you gave at the end, they look like super interesting reads and I'll for sure be checking them out.
This was brilliant, subscribed!
I remember when you said you wouldn't do this, and I'm really glad you changed your mind. It's easy to forget what Persona 5 meant for the genre, so many years removed from it and so many spinoffs and gacha collabs down the timeline that a lot of us are jaded about it, it was a truly historical moment in gaming. The end of the modern era chapter, listing down the sheer number of not just releases but GOOD releases brought a single tear to my eye. What a tale you've woven.
And its global release was the same year as BotW, Nier, Hollow Knight, Dragon Quest 11, RE7, Mario Odyssey, & Xenoblade 2. A year of genre defining games I don't think we've seen since.
i think he doesnt really meant that. its maybe because it will be a huge undertaking. like a 3 hour video.
I'm guessing you're too young to remember, but they did the exact same thing with Persona 4. Everyone loved it, then they released a bunch of spinoffs and half-hearted collabs and it made everyone sick of it. That's just the Atlus way, sadly. Persona 4 was more popular than 3, so they milked to to death, then Persona 5 was more popular than 4, so they ALSO milked it to death. The games themselves are good, it's just all the bloat around it (and certain parts of the fandom) that are obnoxious.
To me, Persona 5 will always be the game that hates women so much it drove the streamer I watched play it to tears.
@svenbtb he didn't say 4 was different.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making these thorough, very long videos. Always fascinating. Love this channel!
Incredible work as always. So much quality of production and exposition, thank you!
It took me a couple of days to finish but I finally watched the entire video. Thank you so much for all of this together! Well done good sir.
Wow, what a nice surprise this morning. Thank you!
What a fantastic video. As someone who never watches long videos, I couldn’t put this one down. This was one of the best researched and best produced videos I’ve had the pleasure of watching on gaming history. It even motivated me to take copious notes on my phone while watching! Thank you for making and sharing this. It’s brought me a lot of joy :)
Loving this video so far and how in-depth it is. Also, thank you for remembering the Rayearth Saturn RPG! I know it’s a tie-in game for a series from another medium and a hard sell, but that game holds a special place in my heart.
This video must have taken forever to make. The amount of research that went into this is incredible. Thank you.
Always a pleasure to see you upload.
Was hoping for mention of magna carta 1 or 2. But cant complain with just the shear amount of work that has gotten into this video. Thank you
This was an amazing video, and I can't give you enough praise for how well put together everything was. Honestly, I started watching, and before I knew it, my entire afternoon just disappeared. Thank you for the history lesson.
I grew up playing video games, but i wasn't exposed to any of the JRPG's on any of the systems on the NES, SNES, and genesis due to various factors, so i came i started a bit late. My first JRPG was FFVIII, and have since been a huge of fan of JRPGs. I've gone back and forth over the years, catching up on classic titles in some series, and i can say that JRPG's are typically one of the few genres that i can say that are my "comfort" genres to play, for various reasons. The rich History of JRPG's, along with one of the highlights of the genre, the music, makes it that more endearing and feeds into nostalgia for a lot of people. I'm glad that there is a resurgence right now for remasters and rereleases for certain JRPG's to get their due dilgence in the west (like dragon quest III remaster, and Live a Live), and i'll be there to support the devs who try.
outstanding vide, great adition to the previous one. Cant wait for more from you.
What a masterful video. I just finished the whole thing, and I loved how this video truly maps out the history of JRPGs and the breadth of what the genre was and became. Thank you for making such an amazing video. It maps out so much of my childhood and also many games I need to play and some I have never even heard of. Thank you so much NeverKnowsBest.
Reading these comments, it sounds like a lot of you have never watched a video of someone talking about jrpg’s. It’s a fine video, but it’s exactly like several other ones that I’ve seen. I wouldn’t say it stands out from the others, if anything it falls a little short to them. But it’s good that you’re appreciative
Man, this is just beautiful stuff. The quality of your videos is through the roof. Loved every second of it.
35:28 Fun fact, Phantasy Star was one of the first games to ever be translated to portuguese in Brazil, and because of that it got to create a nice enough fanbase around here, where many who grew up with the master system (which was on the market for basically decades here) remember it very fondly nowadays.
Quick question, are jrpgs popular in your country? I go on Reddit and see a lot of your people saying nobody knows about said jrpgs or that it’s almost “non existent” but I just don’t get it when you guys are pretty much a PlayStation country(I also heard famicom were popular there,maybe not as much as Sega but you guys had a lot of clones).
Love your videos man! This video and your previous History of RPGs videos are TH-cam GEMS!
I've been waiting for this for a long time!
Genuinely one of the best gaming related videos I’ve watched on TH-cam. Deeply engaging, informative and entertaining. Loved the vid, definitely subscribed!
what a beautiful and informative video man , i hope you keep doing these and i wish you all the best !
There's a real grace to his style.
These videos are like one of the many memorable JRPGs mentioned, you reach to the end and wish you could erase your memory so you can re-live it again. Amazing work, cheers!
A year ago: The Entire History of Video Games
Half a year ago: The Entire History of RPGs
Now: The Entire History of Japanese RPGs
Half a year from now: ???
Taking bets on what subcategory of Japanese Role-Playing Games NeverKnowsBest is gonna tackle next!
"The Entire History of Japanese"
RTS
SRPG
Things with "Tactics" in the title basically.
The entire history of pokemon- come on, it was sparsely covered
@@nkozi The Entire History
I hope for blobber dungeon crawlers.
This guy deserves more subscribers with the amount of quality he has with his videos, loved this video and legit did not see myself sitting down to watch it for 2 hours lol yet I did
We went from crpg to rpg to jrpg... I hope the next rpg video is one I've never heard about.
MMORPG? ARPG?
RPGRPG?
@@A.D.I.D.A.S-916 TRPG or TTRPG or WRPG
@@A.D.I.D.A.S-916 He already did MMORPGs
He just starts going alphabetically: aRPG, bRPG, cRPG (oh wait, we are already out of order)…
@@Puistokemisti I was making a joke
You must put in a LOT of work to put these together. And it’s well worth it. I hope you know just how awesome your videos are.
A correction at 1:26:19 - yes, there were television commercials for JRPGs before FFVII in the US. Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior), Final Fantasy IV (II) and VI (III) definitely had them and I believe Chrono Trigger had one too. You can find them on TH-cam even! But I don’t believe any of them ran in primetime - I remember seeing them after school and on Saturday mornings. When FFVII did get that primetime advertising campaign though, those commercials blew my mind as a kid (along with the fact that we somehow jumped ahead four Final Fantasies! 😂)
Well clearly you failed your consumerism check, by not dragging your parents to the mall... That's what those commercials were for..
Dude my mind was totally blown when saw we jumped to 7. I was so mad and confused. lol
Awesome video. Well done. Love this series you've done with history of RPGs
I dont know if neverknows best, but he sure knows better than me.
I just discovered your channel the other day and I've already watched about 20 hours of your content.
You're already up there with my other favorites like SuperEyePatchWolf etc. Fantastic videos man!
A minor nitpick but it was PC engine in Japan and Turbographx 16 in the US
Incredible video. Very in-depth and informative without getting too lost from the main line of the video. I’ll watch this for many years to come. Thank you!
A lot of JRPGs were missed on the Saturn and Dreamcast. A few of them being brawlers ported from the arcade. Others receiving ports on later consoles. The tactical genre notably including the Sakura Taisen series that also mixed in some sort of dating sim features.
There is a small section missing from arcade ports and another from indies and the Doujinshi market on PC mostly but alSo on portables like the PSP and psvita
Heck yeah a NeverKnowsBest on JRPG's, I might not have the time right now and will probably watch this in parts.
Know that these videos are much appreciated and I do love them! :D
Me at the Playstation part: Cool, guess me and my friends have always pronounced Suikoden wrong till this day. We pronounced it as: Sue-Ko-Den :P
Morning coffee and a new video by Neverknowsbest. Perfection.
Wow, you must’ve done a lot of research to find all this stuff out. Definitely makes for an excellent video!
This video is like a gold mine of infinite new JRPGs to find
What a fantastic video. Amazing job putting this together.
I've an 8 hour flight tomorrow. This came at the PERFECT time!
Bro I've watched all of your videos multiple times and even put them on to fall asleep to. Thanks for the great content!!
fantastic video! I was sitting here smiling and nodding along the whole time.
I always consider a new upload from this channel to be a treat. Your narration is always enjoyable, I like the pacing of the occasional quip to inject some personality, and you strike a good balance between depth and brevity. (Well, for those of us with the patience for a three hour retrospective timeline on video game history.) As an aside, I know you've had some issues striking out of video games, but I'll say that your videos on games I've got no reference for (like the Gothic franchise) were still great - that is to say, if you make it, I'll watch it.
Weird to claim that Final Fantasy 3 was the game that moved the series away form more drawn-out dungeons, when that game has perhaps the most drawn-out dungeons of the entire series. The final dungeon in particular has no competition in the entire series, and almost the entire genre.
The dungeons get progressively more drawn out as the game goes on but in the first half of the game the dungeons are short and quick. I mean while you're on the floating island the biggest dungeon you experience is about 5 rooms.
Whereas final fantasy 2s dungeons are all super long and full of dead ends meant simply to draw out playtime and create more random encounters.
Relatively speaking final fantasy 3 is a huge departure from the previous game. And even the final dungeon (assuming we call the world of darkness a separate dungeon from the crystal tower) is just linear paths with boss rooms at the end
Moved away from "dungeon crawling" not necessarily long dungeons.
The final dungeon is insane, but most of the rest of the dungeons in the game are pretty short compared to the previous games. Also there's more "quests" that happen outside of dungeons, like the kingdom where you crash land and end up fighting Garuda.
@@WolvesbaneNetworkfirst three Final Fantasy games are ALL huge departures from what came before and IMO FF4 dungeons are far more annoying than 1's, especially ones where you have to recast float after every floor transition and they're made like mazes you need to go up and down multiple times.
@@KasumiRINA whole heartedly agree. 3s dungeons are better than 4s. I have yet to play 5 and 6.
Hey NKB, I know this is off topic, but I just really wanted to thank you for all your awesome content. I discovered you fairly recently, and I now watch/listen to your videos all day long at work (I’ve watched your “entire history of gaming” video twice (😳). It makes the day fly by! Keep up the great work! 😁
I just want to appreciate how Atlus still continues to release games that adhere to their original vision, while Square seems ashamed of their turn-based roots and prefers to just make action games now.
Depends how do you look at it - Atlus didn't release blobber dungeon crawler for long time now and that's what their first titles were ;)
I think squares vision has just shifted since then. Also they're still dropping turn based games like octopath. I think the failure of final fantasy 13 has kinda tainted final fantasy from staying turn based (even though the final fantasy 7 remakes have a mixed turn based system). And they've been making action RPGs for years, that's what secret of mana and kingdom hearts were. Atlus has just chosen to stick with turn based cuz the formula is what really set them into the main stream (most notably with persona)
@@pogethedoge Yeah, that's what I mean. But it was also the pushback from western media that mocked japanese games for being outdated and boring compared to 'more exciting' western games. The last FF game I had genuine fun with was 9 and I played every game in the series before that. Since then I always had problems with next entries and after 16 and first remake of 7 I've seen enough, not even gonna bother with the second part of the remake. They can't make a good jRPG or a good action game, FF series is dead to me, while I will play every single Persona and SMT game as long as it stays true to itself.
@@ThatDjinn I've enjoyed a lot of the modern action final fantasies, but I do feel they could be structured in a more interesting way. Remake had a lot of great ideas, especially the combat, music and graphics, but it just feels like a super formulaic action game in terms of structure. Whereas, a game like NieR automata has much more generic combat than remake, but feels completely unique despite this. I would love to see some other teams thrown into the mix, maybe even some of the guys who worked on NieR. Haven't played shin megami, but persona is pretty good. Haven't invested too much time into it though, maybe one day.
Square literally has a turn based RPG releasing next week.
Amazing video!!! This video popped up randomly for me and I'm so glad I watched it. I'm a long-time JRPG fan and this gave a lot of interesting points about games I love. In response to your Suikoden pronunciation question, if you write it out phonetically すいこでん, it is pronounced su-i-ko-de-n, but when pronounced in spoken Japanese the gap between the u and i disappears and they blend together, giving you swee-ko-den, like in the commercial.
I never finished Lost Odyssey, but I still remember the Thousand Years of Dreams as some of the best bits of short fiction I've ever read. The cicada forest story, especially, is a deeply compelling one.
Absolutely. While I found the game's overall narrative to be rather weak and disappointing in the end (the "twist" explanation for the cast's immortality was stupid, and the main villain is SOOO lame and childishly cartoonish), the Thousand Years of Dreams segments are still to this day some of the finest writing I've seen in the genre alongside the Nier and Xeno franchises.
I love this channel. Perfect background content for when I'm doing something else, and interesting and informative about a topic I've loved since childhood when I'm paying more attention. Thank you; I need this in my life.
I owe the Final Fantasy franchise a part of my soul ❤
Another phenomenal video. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into these.
You got to remember SMT Nine which while obscure was the JRPG xbox game and did contribute heavily to the tiny Japan Xbox marketshare
Amazing work man, 3 hour video! Thanks for showing all these games, learned a lot! Makes me want to play all of them
Love how you brought out both that JRPG are really inspired by Japanese media while also allowing for the limitation of the Genre Terms
New to the channel. This is one of the best gaming related documentaries I've ever watched! Amazing work!
Idk why, but your videos give me Christmas vibes :3
Ohhhh you had a whole separate videos for these coming, that makes so much more sense.
We're in for a real treat!
I wished .//hack series had at least a mention, it wasn't as successful or memorable as other franchises but the first 4 titles during the PS2 era, which were part of the same narrative, were very enjoyable and had a banger opening theme
Thank you so much, I love these videos. And thank you for the extended list of games I need to check out that I seem to have missed out on. I've played a good number of the games here, but so many more look amazing and I need to try them.
Final Fantasy Vs. 13 and that entire thing should be its own video. That game is a fucking curse on Square Enix and it’s still felt to this very day.
FFVS13 wasn't ever a game. Nomura pitched a game and before it was hammered down others made trailers for it.
Quite literally nothing about the game was hammered out until tabata started working ~2 yrs before 15s release on what was "vs13"
The game isn't a curse or felt because it literally never existed in any form. Even the basic concept of what the game was shifted a few hundred times while Nomura was busy on KH
The game just shouldn't have been announced and shown off when nothing of it was actually even out of the random ideas coming into peoples heads (it was basically just tossing around concepts for the game nomura was meant to take on after his current projects were done, instead it got pushed and made into 15)
At the time he was pitching it and trying to hammer it out Nomura got stuck on KH and FF7, trying to figure out a 3rd unrelated game that barely even has the names done is a near impossible task
@@death299The game very much existed look up the 2011 trailer Tabata said that when he took over It was 25% complete
Exactly. That game derailed Final Fantasy into the trash bin. If Squenix was smart (hint: they're not), they'll give us a proper turn-based, traditional mainline FF PLUS an action-based FF, rather than completely abandoning an entire foundation of your fanbase. You know, kinda like the ORIGINAL PLAN for FF13 trilogy was supposed to be???
And furthermore, not only is FF16 only getting out of that heap by being almost a different genre entirely, depending on how Kingdom Hearts 4 goes it could also ruin the Kingdom Hearts series considering ideas from VS XIII are being repurposed into Kingdom Hearts 3 at least.
What an amazing video! I learned a lot and it was really engaging to watch! Keep up this quality man 🙌
Vagrant Story is by no means perfect and I definitely had to use a guide to figure out some of it's quirks, but god damn it's so unique and impressive and I wish we could ever get any sort of spiritual succesor to it of any kind.
I just found your channel recently and i cant stop rewatching your videos, easily the best channel ive found in a very long time! Thank you for all the effort you put into each video, i love these long form videos so much. It seems like we get a new video every few months so im hoping there will be a new one soon 😊
Thank you for all the amazing videos, youre the best!
An RPG video game is basically a table top game on your TV. Certainly as far as battle mechanics are concerned.
That is, turn based. Sometimes also with movement tactics.
Your RPG histories are fantastic documentaries and must have been an enormous undertaking. Great work once again!
This guy is crazy! Every video is a documentary movie! Peak of video essays for games.
Are you new to TH-cam? There are a bunch of these, with equal quality and depth. Glad you enjoyed the video, though 👍
I was hoping you'd make this video, amazing!!! Also, how did you make this so fast after the romance video, that's insane! Awesome stuff, man
The main issue with the popular/MGS pronunciation of Suikoden is the emphasis on the 'ko' syllable, as if it's Suikōden.
With your pronunciation, on the other hand, "sui" as "swee" is a bit off to my ears. Consecutive vowel sounds in particular in Japanese (and their vowels in general) can be pretty tricky for native Anglophones.
... Incidentally, Bah-ten Kaitos; not Bay-ten Kaitos.
I didn't realize at the time this dropped how much I would need this as a US-ian. Thanks for coming thru as always king.
The jrpg definition debate always struck me as extremely obtuse.
For example, Italian and Japanese food don't stop being that just by virtue of someone of a different ethnicity or nationality making it. We understand that the country labels are there to denote the origin of a style, not the person making the thing.
Moreover, genre labels are only useful insofar they serve the purpose of making it easier for people to find similar things. We put fantasy novels on one shelf away from say, sci fi, for the purpose of making it easier to find particular types of novels which shares many traits with the other novels with which it is grouped. Hence, the question to ask whether it makes sense to label something a jrpg is whether or not, is only with respects to if fits in on a general venn diagram with some average of the other titles in the genre - in this case, as established in the 80s and 90s with games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
If someone came to you, hot off of completing Chrono Trigger and wanting a similar title to play next, and you wouldn't recommend Dark Souls or Dragon's Dogma, then they're not useful to classify as jrpgs. Converserly, it would make sense to recommend certain western indie callback titles that were made specifically to look, sound, play, and feel like your average 90s jrpg.
This isn't brain-science, and yet it's apparently eluded a great many gamers, and still does.
It kinda is, because once you dig a bit, there is not that much difference between JRPG and western RPG.
For example, most people would aknowledge Shin Megami Tensei as a JRPG. But SMT has CoC, an alignment system, an UI took straight outta Wizardry and a fuckton of things we usually associate with "western" games. Should we start considering it a CRPG instead?
There simply isn't a clear line between western RPG and JRPG that doesn't require a milion of "ifs" and "buts".
@@noukan42 This reminds me that Wizardry itself remained beloved by Japanese players even as its popularity faded in its home country, to the point that the series was even taken over by Japanese devs up until recently. The Etrian Odyssey series are textbook examples of grid-based, dungeon-crawling RPGs straight out of that lineage, but because they have Anime-ish aesthetics, there's always a temptation to call them JRPGs.
I suspect this "JRPG" label thing is mostly a US-centric post-00s phenomenon, when console RPGs made in the US like Fable or Elder Scrolls started to become popular, so a sharp contrast between them and their Japanese-made counterparts had to be drawn. Before that, American-made RPGs mostly inhibited the PC ecosystem, and Japanese RPGs dominated consoles.
Back in the 90s we'd call Final Fantasy, Diablo, Planescape: Torment and Ultima Online all "RPGs" with added qualifiers like "online, turn-based, action or D&D-based". The closest I recall to ever using something like "JRPG" was describing Chrono Trigger to a friend as an "Anime RPG". I suspect this is still how most people define it whether they want to admit it or not: stylistically rather than mechanically.
@sodvar5047 wizardry is a perfect example of why it is problematic. The snes and ps1 ports of wizardry 1-5 have a clearly animesque artstyle. But it would be absurd to call those games JRPG.
Yeah this is so weird to me, but gamers can be a little weird about Japan so it's probably to be expected. People who play board game don't debate what is or isn't a eurogame based on who designed it, it's understood that it describes some mechanics and feel about games more than where those trends originated.
I think people who like and want to defend Japan/act like they're underdogs should be proud that a whole genre is named after the country, even if some people don't like it, it still has some of the most important and recognisable games out there.
I mean those are polar opposites examples, Chrono Trigger is a traditional turn-based JRPG following the conventions of games like Dragon Quest, Ultima and Wizardry while Dark Souls is a more modern action-adventure JRPG which iterates on what games like Ocarina of Time started, if your friend wanted to watch something like Record of Lodoss you couldn't send him to watch Konosuba yes they're both fantasy anime but they're worlds apart.
I don’t need a teaser, this was my first video so I‘ve got the whole series ahead of me.
Just awesome! Thanks.
Very good video. Really good.
A few nitpicks:
- While the inclusion of The Legend of Zelda might be debatable I would clearly define it as (actio) JRPG as games like Landstalker, Soleil, Story of Thor, the Quintet games and so on, so I don´t think it is consistent to leave it out.
- The Gamecube part was a bit short and left out Fire Emblem as an example of a high production SRPG on this console generation as well as Baten Kaitos Origins or the Lost Kingdom games e.c.
- One of the two best JRPGs on the seventh generation wasn´t mentioned: Nier (with Xenoblade being the other best JRPG of this generation) - I already noticed the absence of Drakengard.
Other than that it is - as I said - a really good video.
A big amazing adventure of a video, with a heartfelt conclusion! Perfection 👌
It's gonna be a good Sunday.
thank you for making these long videos, your tone and tempo and writing are all really pleasant to listen to and easy to follow, and its honestly about damn time someone made video game history accessible!
p.s. if you ever happen to do a q&a, i would LOVE to hear about your research process
8:01 The earliest seed of Yakuza being an RPG
😂
your videos are so interesting
theres a bunch of videos on youtube about games on the internet
but your videos... looks like you know how it trully felt like back then
thank you, keep em coming!!
thanks I needed an excuse to stay unemployed
A fantastic video not just for its historical and educational value, but also because it's such a *treasure trove* of titles to play! I am so grateful I watched this video.
Defining JRPGs as RPGs derived from, or inspired by, Japanese media is circular, because JRPGs *are* Japanese media. I think it is much more simple to say that "JRPG" is not a genre, but simply denotes RPGs that are made in Japan. This means that, yes, Dark Souls is a JRPG.
Most Japanese games in the 8-bit and 16-bit era, and beyond, shared the manga aesthetic and inspiration, but no one is calling Mega-Man a "J-Platformer," or Puyo Puyo a "J-Puzzler," or Street Fighter a "J-Fighter."
JRPGs have generally had some characteristics in common, but there are always exceptions. They include many sub-genres like S-RPGs, Action-RPGs, Dungeon Crawlers, etc. The only things they universally share in common are the fact that they have RPG elements and that they are Japanese-it is that simple, I think.
all genres are circular. all language is circular. also i like how your criticism is that his definition is circular and then just repeated his circular definition at the end of your post and acted like you came up with it and acted like it was at all different from his definition.
jrpg as a term obviously exists because non-japanese rpg players felt the need to recognize rpgs from japan as some kinda distinct category based on where they came from. You can literally go back to the first usage of the term JRPG and see it's exactly that, right now, for yourself, just google it. Any other explanation is just agonizing to try to make non-japanese developed, jrpg inspired games fit into the category.
@Snowjob109 I think you may have misread my conclusion. His definition is that J does not mean “Japanese” but “inspired by Japanese media.” I’m saying that J simply means “Japanese,” as to exclude RPGs that are made outside of Japan. So, for example, Dark Souls is a JRPG, but Undertale is not.
I also don’t think it’s a genre, RPG is the genre, the J only denotes where they came from.
The problem with this is that it makes JRPG a useless label, as it doesn't help you to determine games that are similar. If you arent using it as a genre label, then i dont see what the purpose of the term even is.
@@pokeslob You can 'think' all you want, but presenting what merely is your opinion, your take, as if they were facts set in stone does not make them so.
It's generally agreed upon that JRPG refers to its style as described in this video. And you saying "No, I'M saying that it only means japanese-made, therefore I'M right!" louder and louder doesn't change that.
@@MarthSR there is no general agreement for what jrpg refers to and the video contradicts itself by excluding dark souls despite it meeting every criteria he listed.
genre definitions are literally only opinion regardless, so you're not really making a point here
This was a really nice video to listen to while working. Awesome job !